Title: Kids Help Phone (after)

For this image I had several ideas come to mind. My original idea was to shoot my friend’s phone ringing (she has an iPhone so the display would have said Kids Help Phone and would have been very clear to see) and have a hand reaching towards it yet you can see the intimidation and fear in their eyes. I was then going to make my slogan say “Pick up the phone, we’re here to help”. As I began to think of other ideas I came across my friend’s little sister and she looked really distressed while on the computer, so I thought of taking a picture of her looking like that, as if she were getting bullied on the internet. A lot of teens get bullied online a lot; especially now that the internet has evolved so much and it has become much easier to belittle someone online even anonymously. Harsh bullying can lead to psychologically damaging a teen, and if they really can’t handle all the pain and suffering anymore some kids begin to cut, get heavily into drugs or even worse-commit suicide. So what is happening in this image is the girl has come across her “Formspring” inbox. Formspring is a website where you can ask others questions. This can be done anonymously or not. Some cruel people take the opportunity to bash the people they hate online and send them anonymous messages via Formspring. As you can see her inbox says hateful words such as “slut” “whore” and “kill yourself”. To some people it may not bother them, but to someone who is suffering at home or is being bullied at school, online bullying really draws the line. And as much as it seems like it wouldn’t affect a person words DO hurt, and it does change the way a person thinks of themselves and of the world. As for challenges the only one I had encountered was picking which image I wanted to use for Kids Help Phone. My shutter speed was set to 1/500 and my aperture was set to 5.6 and the iso was set to 200. For the editing, the image was required to be in black in white. The image started to look “pixely” once the black and white layer was added, so I increased the yellows (which lightened the person in the image since her hair is blonde) and I increased the blues to make the image look more subtle. I had to edit the “Formspring” website on to the screen and to make it more clear that she was being bullied I added text to her inbox.  

1. rojhanpaydar posted this